[quote]qronos wrote:
Isaac, I was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne, and I can give you two pieces of advice.
- Boot camp can be made easier by some training, but it is designed for you to succeed. They will make you into a Marine, if you are a fat piece of shit, or if you are stacked. And no matter what they will still make it hard for you. The really fast runners in my basic (Army) class had to run with the DI that was the marathon runner.
(note: other schools such as Airborne, SCUBA, Ranger, Special Forces, etcetera are the opposite. These require more careful training, because they WANT a large number to be weeded out. Over a third of my Airborne school class did not pass; about half of those voluntarily, the other half just failed out. There is no “quitting” boot camp unless you go postal or something)
- This is off topic, but you mentioned you might go MI (I did - the Marines trained with us at Fort Huachuca, AZ). Don’t lie on your security clearance forms. You can be an ex-crack dealer, as long as you tell the truth you will get your clearance. If you lie, they will find out. Then you will be fucked. If you ever did something so bad you can’t reveal it (like raped little boys or something) don’t try go into MI, because they will polygraph you eventually.
Being an ex-crack dealer may be beneficial some times. I hear the CIA looks for them. A good friend of mine was recruited to be an operative for the CIA. He used to sell coke in college to other students and he got his clearance no problem. He was italian, but could pass for Spanish (and was a Spanish linguist in my battalion, he passed DLI at Monterey).
After they recruited him, he left our battaion and got sent to Brigham Young University to pretend to be a grad student (and perfect his Spanish to work in South America - B.Y. has the best Spanish program in the country because of all the Mormon missionaries…and of course there are rumors that they’re in cahoots with the government, but I won’t confirm or deny that). He passed that run, then went to Guatamala to pretend to be a missionary and conduct some low level spying. Really just a test run, Uncle Sam didn’t give too much of a shit what was going on in Guatamala.
Unfortunately they fucked up on their personality test somewhere. I’m sure he would have no problem killing people or whatever, but he was a fucking maniac, drank like a fish, loved prostitutes, drugs, fighting, cursing, and such, and he got arrested in Guatamala. This really didn’t fit well with his CIA training (especially since he was pretending to be a missionary), so they bailed his ass out, and three weeks later he was back at Fort Bragg, a failed assassin with lots of tall tales to tell.
Good luck Marine. Make sure you get your gold wings ASAP.[/quote]
A Co 3/504 PIR
I was there too.
All American leads the way.
JW